I M Perfect lady

Tag: movement

  • Uncontrollable me.

    My Art Quilt group was challenged to work with silk and yesterday we shared our experiences.

    If you all have seen or felt or worn silk, you know that it is a moving fabric, it is slippery and slides like it has a life of its own.

    As I played with the silk, I enjoyed it self-expression, its fluid nature lent itself to being used for water and it stands out instead of laying flat pressed neatly like the typical cotton quilt fabric. Used for Lady’s skirts it was fabulous, for it moved and flowed easily.

    It stretched our imaginations to use this alive moving fabric, for you can’t cut it easily, it doesn’t lay down stiff, it glides and wiggles, so in order to make it behave, you have to put a ‘stabilizer’ under it.

    I sat and listened to how some ‘controlled’ the silk to make it lay down like cotton and I was confused. How they added a straightener to back side to take out the fluidity and light airy movement.

    I didn’t quite get why they wanted to take away what is so alive and electric…yet did understand in order to make it fit into their patterns, they had to.

    Last night as I was about to fall asleep, it came to me. They were trying to control the delightful movement it naturally has, the way it just is uncontrollable and instead have it perform like cotton.

    It isn’t cotton, but if you add a foundation of interfacing or another lightweight ‘controlling’ fabric, it will now act like cotton.

    Then a thought came in that the silk fabric represents how live moves and flows and how we all want to put a ‘stabilizer’ on it so we can know how it will go or so we can ‘control’ it better. We are not comfortable with the unknown or with the flow speaking to us, we like to speak to the flow and tell it how to move.

    So, as children do we arrive like silk, flowing, moving, uncontrollable and not easily handled, and then our parents and society add ‘stabilizers’ or straighten us out, and we become rigid and flat. We may have a shiny surface, but we don’t move with the freedom from within, our natural self has been hardened for control.

    We may look the same, but we don’t move the same or respond in our natural free expression, we have been added layers of beliefs and programs so we fit into the pattern of society, we line up and become a piece of the quilt our family has been creating long before we arrived.

    When I played with the silk fabric I was extremely excited about the way it moved and slide around, how it challenged me to find ways to adjust to its nature, I never once thought to make it work differently and I was so shocked that others found a way to settle it down.

    While it does lend shimmer and shine to the cotton that lays next to it, it somehow made me feel sad for the silk to see it so lifeless, its wiggle unwiggable, its flow flattened like being in a straight jacket.

    I love that now I feel more like silk, I move in my own natural way, I don’t want or need ‘stabilizer’ that comes in shades of religious beliefs and societal conformities.

    I want to be the wiggly uncontrollable me.

  • Behave my way into love.

    What I didn’t know about self love is that it wasn’t a word in the head,
    a thought in the mind or even a feeling, but rather Actions.

    The actions you have towards yourself, not how you appear in public, how you walk,
    talk or behave, but rather is is the obvious and the not so obvious.

    Self love is the food you eat, to the way you move your body, to the places you bring it, to the people you subject it to, all comprise the love you have of your self.

    Somehow I think I thought, it was a saying in my head.
    Perhaps the absence of saying, “I hate myself.”

    Yet my self hatred was exposed for all the world to see.

    It was in the food I ate and how much.
    It was in the way I didn’t exercise or even take my body out in the fresh air.
    It was in the silence instead of speaking up, hidden in the yes when I wanted to say no.

    All in all the evidence of self hatred lay literally everywhere, and no amount of positive affirmations planted on the pile of self neglect would change a thing.

    I had to act differently.

    I had to behave my way into love.

  • Movement Against Fear Is Empowering

    I awoke from another profound dream and realized that my subconsciousness is healing.

     

    In the dream I am watching/babysitting an elderly couple, both are in bed, but not the same one, each are bickering to each other, clearly at odds.

     

    I am then sitting in a living room that has a glass wall where I can still see them, and I am reading, when suddenly the man is upon me, groping me, with no longer feeble hands, but very strong.  The woman remains sleeping, unaware.

     

    I am able to get free from his grasp and dial 9-1-1 on my phone, while he continues to pursue, and is now very angry with me for calling for help, and seems desperate to get me before ‘help’ arrives.  He also has picked up an object with which to hurt me.

     

    I put objects in his pathway as I am leaving the house, scrambling and telling 9-1-1 the house number of where he is, which angers him more. 

     

    Then I am in my car and the car is slow to start, but does and he is almost to the door handle… and I take off, leaving him grasping at air instead of the door handle of the car.

     

    I escape, successfully and have informed authorities, dream over. 

     

    I awake with a great understanding of what Peter Levine was talking about. 

     

    In the past this I have had a multitude of cat and mouse scenarios played out in my dreams and the dream always ended with me being caught, the end.

     

    Caught and frozen, just the dream ending and me waking up thankful IT being a dream so ‘nothing’ happened and I were saved. 

     

    Saved only because it was a dream, a scary dream or nightmare and I awoke.

     

    In my dream last night, it was the first time I was able to get away and to take the correct moves to do so, instead of freezing.

     

    Freezing and escaping from the scene by going into a dreamland in my mind, “disassociate” or waking up and it is a dream was all I had in the past.

     

    I had no way to escape in reality…until now.

     

    Boundaries, barriers, putting up a fight, standing up are all things a little child doesn’t have.

     

    It is those very items I am reclaiming and my subconscious mind is showing me in a dream I am succeeding.

     

    I awoke from that dream feeling as a heroine and not a victim.

     

    Moveable and not frozen, clearly seeing the cycle of caught and getting free, being restricted and getting away, instead of just knowing one side, frozen.  Frozen in fear.

     

    The freedom to move makes all the difference in the world.

     

    Movement against fear is empowering.

  • My Dream Begins.

    I feel different in my head.  I see myself differently, my future is unclear, and my sense of who I am seems to be shaky at best.

     

    I have always known who I was and felt like an apathetic passenger in life.  But something changed.  Where before my future seemed to be locked in, like a set of railroad tracks without an exit, it no longer looks that way. 

     

    Instead it seems that life is waiting for me to decide what it is I want to do. 

     

    Shocking.

     

    It is like when I see myself doing yoga and then see the changes, somehow this too can happen in life itself.

     

    I make a choice in the morning to do yoga, and each time I do that, I am changing me inside and out.  I move and it moves!

     

    I have the choice to play in my Art, to write, to learn something new, but I have to be the one to move.

     

    A new class will not arrive in my living room, new quilt designs do not come crawling into my work area, and I have to be the one to move first.

     

    Before I think I thought, that life would offer to me the opportunity.  Now I know that I have to first express the feeling of wanting it. 

     

    I wanted to take care of my body better, and I knew by looking at its neglect that it would require something from me.  Yet, once I began doing this and have continued, it is giving more back to me than I am giving it. 

     

    The more time we spend on taking care of this body the more life it will give us back. 

     

    The healthier it is the more it is alive, the more aliveness, the more energy, the more energy the more we feel free to dream, the more we dream, the more life will open up, the more it opens up the more possibilities arise, as possibilities come, along comes the fearless trying, bringing us further and further into our dream!

     

    I can feel the avalanche of life’s possibilities; the sparks dreams are made of, the energy that ignites and explodes and how it all happens.

     

    When I move my dream begins. 

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